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The POCOS consortium comprises leading researchers, developers and practitioners from academe, commerce, and memory institutions, with outstanding internationally-recognised competence within the Digital Preservation Community.
The University of Portsmouth Future Proof Computing Group (UoP) were the co-ordinators of the POCOS project. Digital Preservation Theory and Practice is at the stage where emulation is starting to be taken seriously as a mainstream strategy alongside migration, to ensure maintainable long-term preservation for cultural institutions first and foremost, but ultimately affecting most areas of society. The Future Proof Computing Group is playing a key role in creating the tools and techniques needed to bring this about, including data modelling for databases and RDF, dimensional modelling for data warehousing, GUI development, and identifying salient legal issues. This work is particularly important for complex digital objects, the creation of whose definitions the group are facilitating in the areas of simulation, visualisations; digital art and computer games.
The British Library is confronted with a number of challenges related to the preservation of and maintenance of public access to its large and growing collection of a wide range of complex digital objects ingested from: i). its voluntary e-Legal Deposit scheme (for which future legislation announced recently by the Prime Minister relating to copyright and legal deposit may massively increase the scope); ii). digital media bundled with physical objects received through existing Legal Deposit legislation (including software, games and audio-visual content); and iii). the web objects harvested through the Library’s Web Archiving project. Research performed by the British Library with partners during the Planets project has highlighted the wide range of formats of digital material which is received by Legal Deposit libraries, who require a far more flexible response mechanism than some other types of organisations with greater control over what formats they will accept. As a Founder Member of the OPF, and a partner in the recently-approved EC FP7 SCAPE Project, which will investigate the use of scaleable cloud computing in digital preservation, BL is closely involved in all aspects of investigation, implementation and promotion of tools and services to support access to its collections. It hopes that the outputs of POCOS will help to inform the entire OPF community and may also influence BL’s own future business strategy. BL also anticipates that the work performed in POCOS may be of value during the consultation which will take place during the drafting of the future copyright legislation recently promised by the Prime Minister.
King’s Visualisation Lab (KVL) staff have been at the forefront of research in simulations and visualisations for the last 15 years and enjoy a substantial international profile for their consistently high quality cutting edge work. They have received c. £5million in external support from both public and commercial sources, including the AHRC, British Academy, Leverhulme Trust, Getty Museum, Royal Gardens at Kew, the Metropolitan Museum NY, and the EU. Their work covers research based modelling of buildings and artefacts; the creation of extensive animations depicting and exploring simulated sites, and including both motion capture and ChromaKey technologies.
The Humanities Advanced Technology & Information Institute (HATII) was established in 1997 and builds on more that 50 years of innovation in the use of ICT in the arts and humanities at the University of Glasgow. HATII is internationally renowned for its research and teaching in Digital Curation, Digital Humanities, Theoretical Approaches to Information, Philosophy of Technology, and Archives and Records Management. HATII has been a major partner in Digital Preservation and Curation initiatives, including - among others - Planets, SHAMAN, the Digital Curation Centre, CASPAR, DPE, WePreserve and 3D-CONFORM.